The darkness began to retreat. Light shone again from the sphere, and once more the winds flowed clean over his hands. They stood like twin statues, and Pazel sensed the woman’s fear ebbing away. Such peace! Could you still want conquests, power over others, worship and dominion and treasure, once you’d felt such peace?
To notice peace when you had it. That was treasure. That was what waking was for.
Through the glass he saw her wide adoring smile. She closed her eyes, and in repose she was so lovely that he could not help it, he lifted a hand and reached to touch her, and the glass sphere burst and rained in a million shards into the pool.
He was alone.
Pazel whirled: one small glass spider crawled from the water and vanished across the floor. He raced around the pool. Gone, gone: he should have been howling with loss. But he could not. He had loved her (loved what?), but her loss was suddenly distant and elusive, as though they had parted years ago.
No, not years. Centuries.
He stared at the empty chamber, shaking, convulsing. There was no source of warmth; he had to move or die. He groped for the exit, dripping, sensing already the deeper cold that lay ahead.
The stairway spat him out upon the lakeshore, half a mile from Vasparhaven, among tall rocks sheathed in ice. The first thing he saw was Hercol and Alyash and Counselor Vadu, talking to a squat figure beside a long wooden boat.
Pazel staggered from the doorway, and the wind went through him like knives. But a bit farther on a great fire blazed, and Ibjen stood warming his shoes. Thasha and Neeps were there as well. They raced to his side, and Thasha wrapped a woolen towel about his shoulders and dragged him to the fire, swearing like a Volpek.
He watched her gruffly as she dried his hair. “You lunatic,” she said, her voice shrill with concern. “You’re cold as a blary fish. How did you get soaked like that?”
Pazel closed his eyes.
“Get nearer to the fire. Take off that mucking shirt!”
He obeyed. Neeps made a joke about him needing a bath anyway, but fell silent when he glared. Thasha was looking at him strangely.
“A novice came from the temple,” she said. “He gave me something gorgeous, in a tiny wooden box. He said it came from you.”
Pazel wished she would just stop talking. He was clutching at memories, like fragments of a story heard once in childhood, and never again. A strange woman, a shining globe.
“We’re crossing the lake tonight,” said Thasha, drying him vigorously, “in three boats. If Hercol can make himself understood, that is. You should go and talk to the fisherfolk, Pazel. They’re mizralds, and we just can’t tell what they’re trying to say. I think they’re afraid of the north shore, but Hercol-”
“Ouch!” he snapped. “Not so hard, damn it!”
Thasha lowered the towel. “Baby.”
“Savage.”
Their eyes met. He touched his scalp, brought away a bloody finger. He was quite annoyed with her, and wondered at the months of agony he’d let her cause. Then Thasha reached into his hair, and brought away something small and hard. It gleamed in the firelight: a shard of crystal, which even as he reached out a finger melted like ice and was gone.
The Black Tongue
8 Modobrin 941
237th day from Etherhorde
When the keel of the fishing-boat dug into the sandy shore, Ibjen was first out: the journey had turned his stomach. And it had been bad, Pazel thought: the open boat with its one spindly mast and weird ribbed sail flapping about like a fin, no lamps on it anywhere, cutting through all that darkness with the wind howling over the peaks, the bright stars wheeling as they pitched and heaved, ice floes looming up suddenly, sometimes even grinding against their sides… He shuddered, and leaped out himself, and winced as his feet sank to the ankles in the watery sand. Freezing, even at midsummer. How did they manage, those fisherfolk, year after icebound year?
At least the moon had sailed above the peaks: a full moon, by which the snowcaps dimly glowed. The second boat drew up beside the first, and the fisherman’s uncle leaped barefoot into the water and pulled it in.
“And to think I’d hoped to sleep a little,” growled Big Skip, wading ashore as the dogs leaped out around him. He cursed as the nearest one shook its wet coat vigorously, then opened the front of his coat. “Are you well, my ladies?” he asked.
“Alive, anyway,” said Ensyl as she and Myett crawled groggily to his shoulders.
The mizralds kept looking at the shore, as though anxious to be gone from it. Hercol counted coins into the fisherman’s hand. The man’s wife took one and studied the strange Arquali designs. “It’s a fake,” she announced. “There’s a tol-chenni on this coin.”
“It’s real gold, I bit one,” said the fisherman’s brother.
“That’s the face of His Supremacy Magad the Fifth you just gnashed,” said Dastu coldly. “You understand? He’s our Emperor, our King.”
The fisherman’s son laughed. “King of the tol-chenni. King of the monkeys, the beasts!” He hooted and beat his chest. His uncle laughed, but his father scowled at him, embarrassed. Pazel looked at the wrinkled, wind- chapped creature. Was he, like Ibjen’s father, just old enough to recall the days before the plague?
Soon all the chilly passengers were ashore. Hercol placed the twentieth coin in the man’s palm, then smiled and added another fistful. “Ask them not to speak of us to strangers, Pazel,” he said. “There is still a chance we might be pursued.”
The family waved goodbye, delight beginning to show on their faces as they realized there was no trick.
“Come,” urged Hercol. “We have gained a few miles on Arunis, I think. Let us gain a few more.”
He started at once up the gray, wind-sculpted beach. As the others straggled after him, Pazel heard a shout from the old fisherman. He turned: the mizrald was splashing up to him.
“You will go down the Ansyndra, and across the burn? What you call Black Tongue?”
“Well, yes,” said Pazel. “There’s no other way, is there?”
The mizrald shook his head. “No other way. No other way except with wings.”
“Wings would be dandy,” said Pazel.
The fisherman nodded solemnly.
“Well,” said Pazel, “goodbye.”
“You go at night, eh? Only at night across the burn. Darkly, quietly: that’s how it’s done. Tell your friends. Because by daylight-no, no.”
“No?”
The mizrald drew his finger across his throat. “No, no and no.”
He stared at Pazel with concern, and looked as though he wished to say more. Then (as his family howled in protest) he pulled the youth down and planted a kiss upon his forehead. Then he turned and pushed his boat offshore.
Stunned, Pazel hurried after the others. They were trudging west along the rim of the lake, toward the spot the mizralds had said was the only way down. Pazel could hear a rushing of water, and the now very familiar slushing roar of a waterfall. He ran, catching up with Neeps and Thasha. Neeps was gazing back across the lake.
“How are we supposed to return?” he said. “The fisherwoman herself said they almost never come down here. And half the time there’s no shore to walk along, just blary cliffs. How are we supposed to get back?”
“There must be trails through the mountains,” said Pazel, trying to sound as though he believed it. “Hercol and Olik must have thought about it, mate. Don’t worry.”
Thasha’s gaze swept darkly over the peaks. “They thought about it, all right,” she said.
Their destination, as it happened, was similar to the Chalice of the Mai: a river outlet above a sharp descent.
